In his decision to film (rather than simply photograph) Pollock painting, Hans Namuth cited Pollock’s “moving picture—the dance around the canvas.” Namuth quoted in Pepe Karmel, “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,” in Kirk Varnedoe, Jackson Pollock, exh. See Ralph Rugoff, The Scene of the Crime, exh. Moreover, is it possible (or even helpful) to try to discern the difference? “My conclusion was that I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever it was I was doing in the studio must be art.” Interview with Bruce Nauman by Ian Wallace and Russell Keziere in Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words, ed. Eleey, Peter. 5 (1990), cited in Corinne Diserens, “Tracé brownien,” in Teicher, Danse, précis de liberté, 11. Embracing everyday movement rather than stylized forms, she performed in the alternative spaces of Greenwich Village and SoHo—as well as on rooftops and literally on museum walls—developing a signature movement vocabulary. Kristine Stiles refers to the “commissural” quality of art objects and images created out of actions that are themselves activities meant to be considered as art, referring to a contingency between products and their production. In addition to dance, Brown is known for her work in the visual arts, including improvisational works combining dance and drawing, and collaborations with artists including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Laurie Anderson and Terry Winters. Though they weren’t dances per se, these pieces—including works such as Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance) (1967–1968), whose title makes the connection explicit—were nevertheless structured activities within a defined space, for a specified period of time.36 When Nauman made these works, they were closer to dance than to art. Art historian Susan Rosenberg draws on Brown's archives, as well as interviews with Brown and her colleagues, to track Brown's deliberate evolutionary trajectory through the first half of her decades-long career. examines Trisha Brown’s drawing and dancing works of 1970s, when she negotiated with history while at the same time explaining and defining her individual artistic voice. When we look at Brown’s early notational drawings, the envisioned action is a given; it is what we naturally privilege in our encounter with them. All two-part combinations of blue arcs from corners and sides and blue straight, not straight and broken lines., September 1972, blue crayon, dimensions variable. Nevertheless, Schneemann described Tracking as a “seismograph or Ouija Board,” which is an interesting metaphor.51 Similarly, Alan Saret’s series of Gang Drawings, begun in 1967 as studies for sculpture and made with fistfuls of pencils, has been described as “neurological seismograph[s] recording the tremors of intent.”52 There is something apt in thinking of dance—especially Brown's—as a kind of geologic space under the influence of magic.53 In geology, stratigraphy is the subdiscipline concerned with the sequence of deposition at an archaeological site; it seems reasonable, if not desirable, to apply our own version of the geologist’s “law of superposition” to the field of her drawings, as scientists have done with Pollock’s layers of drips, trying to distinguish the temporal sequence of events.54 As Brown herself notes, “The mind comes along and wants to organize things,” and what we want to organize are the tracks on the paper back into a dance.55. Indeed, many of the It’s a Draw works read as accidental and random, as the happenstance result of some great force being driven over the paper or visited upon it.49. The quandrants were meant to correlate to the body’s limbs, but as Brown notes, “since they had no head or torso info, they didn’t actually work” as compositions.11 Nevertheless, in her emphasis on these kinds of “primary structures,” she was squarely in step with the minimal pictorial and sculptural vocabularies of her peers in New York.12 She describes her method and predilection: “Merce [Cunningham] worked with chance; I worked with structure.”13 When curator Richard Armstrong discusses sculpture of the period as existing “between geometry and gesture,” he could be speaking just as easily of Brown’s early dances, works such as Structured Pieces (1973–1976), which, like much of the art of their time, reiterate the utter independence of sensuality from luxury.14 Her quadrant drawings bear comparison to a whole range of period pieces, most clearly those such as Sol LeWitt’s serialized geometric variations (fig. Written to accompany the artist’s 2008 Walker survey exhibition, this essay by curator Peter Eleey presents necessary historical and critical context for the artist’s signature work It’s a Draw – For Robert Rauschenberg (2008) and other works on paper in the Walker’s collection. The work is called It’s a Draw/Live Feed when Brown performs it live (though alone), and simulcasts it to an audience outside of the room in which she creates the work. Janine Antoni uses her eyelashes and mascara; Trisha Brown makes drawings with her feet; John Cage uses plants and seaweed; and Mona Hatoum uses human hair. In 1961 she participated in Robert Dunn's classes at Merce Cunningham Studio. Deborah Jowitt, “Stepping Out with Anton Webern,” Dance Magazine 70, no. Brown quoted in Teicher, Danse, précis de liberté, 27, and conversation with the author, September 20, 2007. Blind Train Drawings... 700x525 0 0. Conversation with the author, January 11, 2008. For Schneemann, the body is central to the work, to a degree that the resulting drawing becomes secondary. Trisha Brown – maverick Postmodern dancer and visual artist – arrived in New York in 1961 and quickly became the city’s avant garde ‘It’ girl. See Brown’s Locus (1975), reprinted in Dance and Art in Dialogue, 87. Though anomalous among her drawings from the 1970s, the score for Locus is the most important of Brown’s works on paper from that era. 34), or the urban walking performances of Francis Alÿs, in which the artist leaves behind a trail of paint, evaporating water, or an unraveling thread from his sweater.64 And yet, actions are shaking off the mantle of codependency. Since the beginning of her career in the 1970s, drawing has been part of Trisha Brown’s working process as an artist. (Andover: Addison Gallery of American Art, 2002), 76. (New York: Phaidon, 2002), 78. Like JPG. “The body solves problems before the mind knows you had one,” Brown says.59 Her best drawings, like her dances, allow us to witness the mind and the body playing catch-up with each other, “investigating,” as she puts it, “the disparity between the two simultaneous experiences, what the artist [makes] and what the audience [sees].”60 But something gets lost or concealed in that lag time, and the out-of-body experience it provokes. The terms of Action Painting, naturally, are the terms of dance, and Brown has no need to borrow them back. Originally published in Trisha Brown: So that the Audience Does Not Know Whether I have Stopped Dancing, exh. fig. Bryn Mawr College, Canaday Library Class of 1912 Rare Book Room … Like JPG. Like JPG. Collection the artist. 25: Carolee Schneemann performing Tracking, 1973. Collection the artist. ©Robert Rauschenberg/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 91. 215.561.8888 29). Produced by lying directly upon the paper, the photograms anticipate not simply Le Va’s collisions, but Yves Klein’s Anthropometries (1960–1961), Jasper Johns’ Skin drawings (1962) (fig. 26: Andy Warhol, Dance Diagram (2) (Fox Trot: “The Double Twinkle-Man”), 1962. fig. 11: Trisha Brown, Untitled (Locus), 1975, graphite on paper, 18 ¾ x 15 ½ x 1 9/16 in. The piece prescribes a dance that gets one unit closer to completion with each repetition, ending up as an archive of its own construction.57 It is choreography as reverse stratigraphy, snowballing into a single expression such that by its conclusion, the individual movements are no longer identifiable. fig. 13: Trisha Brown, Untitled (Locus), 1975, graphite on paper, 18 ¾ x 15 ½ x 1 9/16 in. 2), which he had created as an onstage performance, situating the back of the canvas toward the audience. This complicated relationship between movement and its representations is something that Brown has long explored, beginning in the early 1960s with the recognition that Labanotation, the compositional vocabulary she had learned in college, was insufficient to describe the kind of movement she wanted to make.7 When she arrived in New York in 1961, Brown enrolled in Robert Dunn’s workshop at Merce Cunningham’s studio, joining Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and other dancers with whom she would shortly form the Judson Dance Theater. In honor of her company's 40th anniver… She has used movement to generate graphic works and used drawing to catalyze action. ©2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome, copy photograph © and courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. I did it with my voice.”42 The year after Planes, she devised Skymap (1969), an audio work for which she instructed the audience to imagine a geography on the ceiling. What Brown’s drawings represent, then, is a chance to repatriate a piece of what dance—not music or theater, nor performance more generally—bequeathed to the modern image, and in particular to the fated gesture that came to loom over the past half-century. fig. 32). The image would be the result of this encounter.”. (53.98 x 61.6 x 3.97 cm) framed. LeWitt’s schematics predate Brown’s exercises, but she maintains that she was unaware of them at the time she made the drawings. In places we can discern actual footprints and handprints rendered painterly, like those of Johns and Hammons, in the mingling of charcoal dust, oil, and sweat. In conjunction with an exhibition of her drawings, modern dance legend Trisha Brown improvises movements across a large piece of paper placed on the Medtronic Gallery floor. Representing the cube—one of the central subjects of artists during the late 1960s and early 1970s—but inscribing the moving body inside it, Locus knits together the Minimalist boxes of Donald Judd and Robert Morris with the critical reassessment of the gallery’s qualities of containment that was implicit in the work of Bochner and many other artists at that time.18. 30–31) while listening to Bach, or when she actually lies down on the paper during It’s a Draw so that she is too close to the surface to discern the entire image.46 Her need to destabilize visual knowledge in order to free her body likely comes from the lessons of Halprin’s task-based exercises. Photo: Larry Fox, courtesy Tom Marioni. fig. TBDC is a post-modern dance company dedicated to the performance and preservation of the work of Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer, Trisha Brown. fig. Over the course of the decade, since the advent of major art-historical reassessments of the legacy of performance within the visual arts, the recognition of actions as sites of meaning on a par with art objects has reached its logical conclusion, evolving to a condition in which we are now increasingly comfortable with its pure commodification. 28: Trisha Brown, Planes, 1968, performance installation with film by Jud Yalkut and soundtrack by Simone Forti, 152 x 210 x 12 in. We look beyond the surface, eliding the fact of the drawing in the space between the action and the image, truncating its presentness. Should it surprise us that dance has so much to tell the picture? See Claire Bishop’s 2005 report on the sale of a Tino Sehgal piece to the Tate at http://www.artforum.com/diary/id=9671. (53.98 x 61.6 x 3.97 cm) framed. The horizontality of the drawing during its making (as distinct from Warhol’s Dance Diagrams, which, while exhibited on the floor, were likely painted upright) etches gravity into the image; her choice to exhibit them on the wall allows its weight to become visible.48 Furthermore, it connects drawing to the street, allowing the surface to read as a catalogue of movements that seem pedestrian in both senses of the word. 26) to the tensions inherent in her early drawings. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 233. Brown’s various works created in public spaces cemented this expanded notion of dance, broadening the physical field in which dance could occur. (28.9 x 40.6 cm). Regarding the Dance Diagrams, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966,” in Andy Warhol, Annette Michelson, ed. Collection Walker Art Center, Butler Family Fund, 1989, 1989.67. Let us now admit the famous dancer back into the room—or rather, admit that she never left. Recalling this time in her life, 40 years earlier, Brown makes a small gesture. Founding Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. The exhibition is designed to set up conditions that invite viewers to make connections between Ms. Brown’s creative methodologies in drawing and choreography. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). 23: Trisha Brown, Untitled, 1995, ink on paper, 29 ¼ x 37 1/8 x 1 9/16 in. 34: Matthew Barney performing Drawing Restraint 6, 1989. Photo ©Carol Goodden. TBDC is a post-modern dance company dedicated to the performance and preservation of the work of Founding Artistic Director and Choreographer, Trisha Brown. 15: Trisha Brown, Untitled (Locus), 1975, graphite on paper, 18 ¾ x 15 ½ x 1 9/16 in. Sitting beside a piece of paper on the floor and holding a pen between her toes, she used each foot to draw the other (fig. 7: Yvonne Rainer, sketch for first part of Trio B, c. 1968. Art history, owing to its preference for enduring objects, has struggled to make sense of the contingency between such objects or images and the activities that produced them—particularly in its efforts to describe the 1960s and 1970s, when those activities often became as much a part of the art as the products that survived.4 Jackson Pollock is credited with inaugurating this historical thread in the late 1940s with his “allover” poured paintings, produced on the floor through an animated process of dripping that is easily, and often, described as dancing.5 A dancer making images to be considered as art, however, almost has to work against the ease of such readings. Performance works from the 1960s and 1970s have begun more recently to be offered for sale, in certain cases for the first time. For example, Kynaston McShine’s 1966 exhibition Primary Structures, conceived with Lucy Lippard, at the Jewish Museum. 17: Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil, Untitled [double Rauschenberg], c. 1950. Trisha Brown: Drawing on Land and Air Exhibition Checklist Drawings 1-6.) Photo: Peter Moore ©2013 Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, NYC. titled Trisha Brown: Drawing on Land and Air, is a survey of her drawings from the mid 70s to the present. 25), itself recalls the earlier works of Shiraga Kazuo, who, similarly suspended, paints with his feet on floor-based canvases, and who once wrestled mud as a public performance. The performers appear in places to be skydiving, “turn[ing] continually, spiral[ing] down and climb[ing] all over the place in slow-motion to suggest free fall.”40 Gravity is flipped up on its side, such that the dancers are falling horizontally through the space, rather than down through the floor. Trisha Brown, Untitled, 2007, charcoal, pastel on paper, 132x147 cm. 18). 17). See also the relationship between Brown’s Leaning Duets and the prop pieces of Richard Serra in Klaus Kertess, “Story About No Story,” in Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961–2001, exh.

Trisha Brown re-shaped the landscape of modern dance with her game-changing and boundary-defying choreography and visual art. The studio, after all, is as much a stage as it is a workshop where objects and images get made. [email protected], College/Postgraduate Apprentice Training Program, Website created by Matsumoto Incorporated. Robert Morris’ Box with the sound of its making (1961) displays a similar conflation of composition and product. 30: Trisha Brown, Untitled, 1994, ink on paper, 20 ¾ x 17 ⅝ x 1 9/16 in. “All that remained was the ceiling. See Bruce Nauman, interview by Michele de Angelus, in Kraynak, Please Pay Attention Please, 248. He must become a connoisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked.”, “My relationship to dance is … directly responsible for my new interest in the spectator’s active role. 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